282 Responses

Interesting potential trickery to disguise donation sources. Let's see some journalistic digging about other instances of the same tactic of multiple identical amounts being filed in 2011 election returns. Doubt it was Banks' cunning plan.

Interesting potential trickery to disguise donation sources. Let's see some journalistic digging about other instances of the same tactic of multiple identical amounts being filed in 2011 election returns. Doubt it was Banks' cunning plan.

It reminds me of BRT stalwart Trevor Farmer funnelling his donations to ACT through family members, in order to avoid scrutiny. The Sunday Star Times saw through the bullshit and made it front page news.

I sniff a tipping point for National: Banks' actions are indisputedly morally grubby politics, if not downright dirty. He defends his actions on a legal basis, rightly or wrongly. But the man has long been prone to commandeering the moral high ground on all sorts of issues. With the number of "careless" Cabinet Ministers and MPs so far in Key's tenure, voters will start to see this administration as somewhat less than lily white.

How so? There's no MMP at play in a by-election, unless I've misunderstood something. Goldsmith is a list MP, if he gets elected by Epsom he resigns his list seat and it gets filled by whoever's next on National's list. Act disappears, because they have no list MPs, Goldsmith takes the electorate seat currently occupied by Banks, and there is no net change in anything of substance in the calculus of Parliament.Or does the MMP maths get re-jigged under by-elections? That sounds like a remarkably effective way to fuck with the composition of Parliament.

What you said first up ... if Goldsmith wins, he quits as a list MP before being formally declared the elected MP for Epsom, thus bringing in whomsoever is next on National's list.

If ACT wins, nothing changes. But if Parker wins ... ? Then he quits as a list MP before being formally declared the elected MP for Epsom, Labour gets one more MP, and National are forced to rely on the Maori Party for a majority.

Pattrick Smellie theorises in BusinessDay that Johnny Boy's 'teflon coating' is to do with American-style red-blue state polarisation landing in NZ:

Yet, maddeningly for the parties of the Left, none of this is showing up in the opinion polls. This is variously explained away as evidence that their fellow citizens are brainwashed fools, that the Government has great propaganda, or that the polls will "catch up".

None of these theories bear great scrutiny. New Zealanders are sceptical, clever people with almost too many conflicting ideas about how the country could be made better, the Government shoots itself in the foot almost daily, and although the polls may catch up, they may not. Who knows?

So what's going on? One theory that might explain the continuing popularity of what looks like an unpopular Government is that New Zealand politics is in the process of becoming more polarised. When that happens, the people who do get angrier may not be a larger group than before. Rather, they may simply be a louder, angrier group.